Every business has events that create opportunities and risks. Some of these events are time-critical, requiring timely attention to prevent a lost opportunity. The greatest potential for maximizing opportunities or minimizing risks associated with time-critical business events may exist immediately after the event occurs.
Many events that affect a business are too dynamic to be modeled in any single operational system. For example, a stock-control system can be designed to place replenishment orders automatically when stocks are low, and when new stock is received to allocate it to outstanding customer orders according to one or more predetermined rules, such as oldest orders first or largest orders first. What the stock-control system will not be designed to take into account is that a particular customer has, over the last three months, received two faulty items, an incorrect final payment demand. Therefore, receipt of an order from that unsatisfied customer which cannot be fulfilled because an item is currently out of stock, is an event that the account manager needs to know about immediately in order to effectively manage the relationship with that customer. In this case, the business event that requires management is derived from multiple indicators spanning several systems.
In addition, many events over which there may be no direct control available but which have a direct impact. For example, movements in commodity prices or exchange rates can invalidate existing plans and forecasts. It would be advantageous for these external factors to be monitored so that forecasts can be revised if original assumptions are no longer valid.
Event management endeavors to assist in moving an issue forward to a sensible next step and conclusion, or “managing the event”. An event management system (EMS) enables internal and external data from multiple disparate applications to be related and evaluated, making traditional data sources “event aware”. Event management initiates appropriate actions upon detection of an event to ensure successful resolution of that event.
Many business intelligence (BI) applications perform some form of event management. Analysts model the anticipated events that will occur within the system, including anticipated exceptions, and apply a process for handling them. The system then deals with routine events and exceptions and produces reports on those it is not designed to handle.
BI applications are often used as rudimentary forms of event detection. Reports enable users to receive regular indications of business performance. Typically, the data on which they are reporting is derived from multiple sources and is loaded into a data warehouse and data marts by an extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) tool. This data can often form the bedrock on which a company's strategies are based and subsequently monitored.
However, these traditional BI applications are not well suited to providing feedback on rapidly changing business conditions. Traditional reporting is fixed, not focused on the user. Furthermore, it is difficult to incorporate external data that may change frequently into data stores. The onus is still on the user to locate the data that directly affects them. The sheer volume of data available can result in more time, not less, being spent identifying important items that require action.
Early event management solutions included systems such as financial trading systems that created alarms, alerts, or warnings when stocks and commodities crossed a pre-determined threshold to alert the trader to take appropriate action. Other example is supply chain solutions, where there exist mechanisms by which appropriate people can be warned if, given the demand forecast and current inventory holding, unless stock is moved from warehouse A to warehouse B now, the forecasted demand at a given retail outlet won't be met because of the time taken to ship inventory.
These early event management systems have at least two problems in common. Firstly, they tend to be restricted to a single system and cover only a single process. Secondly, they are built into the application, and therefore are not flexible.
Modern EMS's now typically include business activity monitoring (BAM) capability. At its broadest level, BAM is the convergence of traditional business intelligence (BI) and real-time application integration. Information is drawn from multiple application systems and other sources, both internal and external, to provide a richer view of business activities and the potential to improve business decisions through availability of the latest information. BAM aims to reduce the time between information being captured in one place and being usable in another.
In a modern EMS there are generally three types of events to monitor and detect: notification events, which involve monitoring the availability of new report content; performance events, which involve monitoring changes to performance measures held in data sources; and operational events, which involve looking for events that occur in operational data.
An event may represent an important situation, therefore, there is a need for a system capable of reducing the time between information capture and use, and provide personalized delivery to suit the work patterns of the recipient. Such a system delivers data about the event to a recipient in a timely manner; enables users to view data from different angles to discover trends or inconsistencies; and reduces or eliminate duplicate or irrelevant message deliveries to ensure message content is always of the highest value, and provides support for desktop and mobile devices through electronic mail. The destination of the messages may be dependent on the real-time outcome of the business intelligence being monitored, i.e. the recipient is dependent on the monitored event.
Therefore, there is an unmet need for a system that can run agents to collect and bring critical information to the attention of users, rather than relying on users to find the critical information to react. Such a system should free users from the routine scanning of reports, creating time for them to investigate new areas. It should also improve efficiency by running reports by necessity, rather than by schedule. Such a system further automates the detection of critical business events, and by bringing together relevant information from multiple sources, and disseminate information to individual recipients or other business systems. Further, such a system monitors an event to ensure successful resolution and generate new BI information. By automatically monitoring events in real-time or on a schedule, an EMS can enable users to keep track of a greater number of events, and with a finer degree of granularity.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for an improved method and system for dynamic recipients in an event management system.